Royal Wedding Shatters Online Audience Records

Will and Kate's nuptials strained some live stream providers but the Internet backbone escaped a record-setting online audience unbroken.

They tried their best to break the Internet. But in the end Prince William and Kate Middleton's wedding, though setting records for an online streaming audience on Friday, only managed to slightly bruise the global network's backbone.

Early returns suggest that several companies providing live streaming video of the wedding saw record audiences from around the globe, including Google-owned YouTube and Livestream. And while sites showing live streams did experience some traffic-caused lag time in delivering their streams, most held up without crashing entirely.

But the royal newlyweds did manage to do some real damage closer to home. The BBC's live stream of the Royal Wedding crashed just as Middleton (now Princess Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge) began to walk down the aisle at Westminster Abbey, according to reports.

"YouTube's homepage maintained 100 percent availability and a fast response time of 1.24 seconds" during the Royal Wedding, AlertSite reported.

"However, for people who went directly to YouTube's official Royal Wedding Channel, the experience was different. The Royal Wedding Channel page had an average availability of 74.26 percent with 10.34 second response times. Most of the timeouts were related to restarting the live video stream."

For other major sites AlertSite monitored, ABCNews.com and AccessHollywood.com had the highest average response times during the wedding, while Facebook and Twitter reportedly "outshone the others with 0.56 and 1.82 second response times respectively."

Livestream told PCMag that the 300,000 concurrent viewers of its wedding stream at 6am ET were a record for the company, breaking its previous concurrent viewers record of 130,000 viewers for the Oscars earlier this year by more than double.

A spokesperson also said the company was still processing its analytics and expected 2 million unique viewers of Livestream's mix of coverage from the Associated Press, the UK Press Association, CBS and Entertainment Tonight.

Internet hosting services provider Akamai Technologies also pointed to record numbers for the 25 or so broadcasters for whom the company delivered Royal Wedding-specific streams, a spokesperson said.

"Early data is showing that streaming numbers related to the Royal Wedding sites we supported had a higher peak of concurrent users than the specific World Cup sites we supported," Akamai's Jennifer Donovan told PCMag Friday.

But Donovan said it can be difficult to come to concrete conclusions about the size of live events like the Royal Wedding.

"There are a lot of factors involved with these live events, which is why we can't call one event the biggest or larger than another," she said in an e-mail. "It's like comparing apples and oranges sometimes. The World Cup traffic peak on Akamai's Net Usage Index for News happened during the day when both the U.S. and Europe were in the office and the only place to watch was online.

"The Royal Wedding happened when the U.K. was on holiday and in the U.S. prior to people being in the office, showing that consuming video on the Internet is an increasingly complimentary choice to broadcast TV, even when the event is available on TV. Not all the World Cup games were on TV so more people were driven to the Internet to watch, as well.

"So that's interesting to note given this event was all over TV. There's also the factor of the number of syndication partners that had the rights to stream online, which can affect the numbers."

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Japan Times, among other newspapers and periodicals.
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Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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